Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

To:A. I. RYKOV[2]

Dictated:Dictated by phone on April 5, 1922Published:First published in 1959 inLenin Miscellany XXXVI.

      Printed from a typewritten copy.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,1976,

      Moscow,Volume 45,

      pages523b-524a.Translated:Yuri SdobnikovTranscription\Markup:R. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet ArchiveYou may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
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ComradeRykovCopy to ComradeTsyurupaCopy to the C.P.C. Managing Department

Idraw your attention to the exceptional importance of
the work of exploring the Kursk Magnetic Anomaly.
ComradeKrzhizhanovskyhas informed me, that, according to
the engineers with whom he has talked, it has been Virtually
proved that we have there an incredibly rich reserve of
pure iron. Comrade Martens believes that it has been proved
already. He intends to go there within three weeks. We
must discuss whether we should send along with him some
engineer from the State Planning Commission with a betterknowledge of Russian conditions and who is capable of
checking up whether there is no exaggeration of any sort
there.

Ithink we should not let the press have any information
about this and should take steps to see that nothing is said
about this in the press, because otherwise we may expect
that the interventionist plans may very well be
intensified. For the same reason, perhaps, it would be better not
to haveMartens’sreport made either to the C.P.C. or the
C.L.D., but to have it heard only by both deputies, Bogdanov
and some C.C. members.

Ifthe report ofMartensand the engineer who is to go
with him on behalf of the S.P.C. confirms that the matter
is serious, we must get the work going as fast as possible,
without in any case stinting the necessary gold
appropriations, and establishing special supervision to have the
necessary equipment received from abroad (diamond,
drilling, etc.) with the maximum speed. I very much fear that
this business will be carried out without sufficient energy.
But the fact is, according toKrzhizhanovskyandMartens,
that we have there almost surely a stock of wealth
unequalled anywhere in the world, and capable of
revolutionising the whole of
metallurgy.[1]

[1]SeeDocument 726 of this volume; present edition, Vol. 35,
Doc. 316; and Fifth (Russian) Edition, Vol. 54, Doc. 365.—Ed.

[2]Thisletter deals with the exploration of the Kursk Magnetic    
Anomaly (KMA).

Lenindisplayed great interest in this work. His attention to          
the KMA and his help in its exploration can be seen from these         
documents and from the reminiscences of contemporaries, among          
them I. M. Gubkin and V. N. Rozanov (seeVospominaniya o           
V. I. Lenine, Part 2, Moscow, 1957, pp. 357–79, 402–04).

TheC.P.S.U. Programme adopted by the Twenty-Second Party          
Congress provided for the establishment of a metallurgical base    
in the central European part of the U.S.S.R. using the ores of     
the KMA.